If the NSA spent their time making the cyber defenses of this country stronger instead of making it weaker with compromised encryption, rampant back doors, etc., there's a good chance this data breach would not have happened.

That is an extremely important point. The NSA is charged with protection of U.S. government communications and information systems against penetration and network warfare. Thus, the SF86 breach is a clear failure of the NSA. Had the NSA kept its focus on what it is supposed to be doing, the breach might well never have happened. Instead, though, the NSA has shifted its focus to activities that are illegal, unconstitutional, and seriously harmful.

This is further strong evidence that the top people at the NSA should be wholesale removed.

Moore's law is sort of a mangled version of Koomey's law. Koomey's law states that the number of computations per joule of energy dissipated has been doubling every 1.6 years. It appears to have been operative since the late 1940s: longer than Moore's law. Moreover, Koomey's law has the appeal of being defined in terms of basic physics, rather than technological artefacts. Hence, I prefer Koomey's law, even though Moore's law is far more famous.

There is another interesting aspect to Koomey's law: it hints at an answer to the question "for how long can this continue?" The hinted answer is "until 2050", because by 2050 computations will require so little energy that they will face a fundamental thermodynamic constraint—Landauer's principle. The only way to avoid that constraint is with reversible computing.

For some great background on how corrupt Pao and her husband are, see "Some Thoughts on Ellen Pao’s Marriage", by Richard Bradley. Basically, Pao's husband has a history of dubious lawsuits, and Pao seems to have gone along in his family suing business.

wabrandsma writes: DutchNews.nl writes:
Internet providers no longer have to keep their clients phone, internet and email details because privacy is more important, a Dutch court ruled on Wednesday.

Digital Rights organisation Bits of Freedom writes in a Blog:
The law’s underlying European directive was meant as a tool in the fight against serious crimes. The Dutch law, however, is much more expansive, including everything from terrorism to bike theft. During the hearing, the state’s attorneys avowed that the Public Prosecution does not take the law lightly, and would not call on the law to request data in case of a bicycle theft. The judge’s response: it doesn’t matter if you exploit the possibility or not, the fact that the possibility exists is already reason enough to conclude that the current safeguards are unsatisfactory.Link to Original Source

Clinton printed over 50,000 pages of e-mails, which were then shipped to the State Department. It would have been less work for her to send those e-mails electronically. What was her purpose in doing that extra work?

Printed texts take more time to search, and they do not contain all the internal meta-data. Perhaps too she just wanted to show her middle finger to the people who asked for her e-mails.

If... anyone feels personally abused, threatened, or otherwise uncomfortable due to this process, that is not acceptable.

It does not matter how every person feels. There are some people who get offended about almost anything. The above quote seems to be part of the extreme political correctness that is infecting society—I never imagined that Linux development would go that way. Additionally, if people feel “uncomfortable”, that might well be well warranted and help them to develop.

The quote would be better replaced by something that omits mention of feelings (which are internal and cannot be independently assessed). I suggest appealing to the “reasonable person”, as is commonly done in law. Here is an example: “Personal abuse and threats are unacceptable, as is any behavior that reasonable people would deem to be highly or persistently offensive”.

In the early 20th century, measured IQ gaps between protestant and Catholics in Northern Ireland was as large as that between whites and blacks in America today. Yet that gap has now completely disappeared.

1. The vulnerability is Security 101 stuff (even a good password, like “D0nM@tt1ngly!”, was still vulnerable).
2. The vulnerability was publicly known since May.
3. Apple defaults users into the cloud (and Apple makes it very hard to not store in the cloud).
4. Apple does not encourage two-factor authentication (it discourages this).
5. Two-factor authentication wouldn't have worked anyway (it is not actually enforced on iCloud).

The NASA report titled "Anomalous Thrust Production from an RF Test Device Measured on a Low-Thrust Torsion Pendulum" was published 3 days ago and can be found here: http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.js...
From the abstract:

This paper describes the eight-day August 2013 test campaign designed to investigate and demonstrate viability of using classical magnetoplasmadynamics to obtain a propulsive momentum transfer via the quantum vacuum virtual plasma.